Trump’s Presidency Is Already Making Republicans Love Big Government More

[corbe]

Trump’s Presidency Is Already Making Republicans Love Big Government More

With Trump in the White House and the GOP in control of Congress, many conservatives are convincing themselves big government isn’t so bad after all.

John Daniel Davidson
By John Daniel Davidson
January 9, 2017
 

A few weeks after the presidential election, Donald Trump’s economic advisor Stephen Moore told a group of top Republican lawmakers that they no longer belonged to the conservative party of Ronald Reagan but to Trump’s populist working-class party. Moore said Republicans, in this new era of Trump, should be “less ideologically pure” and instead try to help Trump give Americans what he promised them: trade protections, massive infrastructure spending, and a border wall.

This is the same Stephen Moore who up until November 8 had spent much of his career arguing for supply-side economic reforms, ample immigration, and free trade. Not anymore. Trump’s election has turned him into an economic populist. “Having spent the last three or four months on the campaign trail,” he told The Hill, “it opens your eyes to the everyday anxieties and financial stress people are facing.” For Moore, as for Trump, that means the government is here to help.

Moore’s transformation from free market economist to Trump populist is emblematic of a change sweeping the conservative political elite. With Republicans in control of the legislative and executive branches for the first time in more than a decade, skepticism about the federal government among conservative leaders is melting away. Those who have for years defined themselves politically as the only ones resisting the growth of a powerful and coercive administrative state are now, it seems, okay with it. To quote Boromir, this ring is a gift. Why not use it?

Take former Texas governor Rick Perry, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy. Perry vowed to eliminate the agency during his 2012 presidential bid (and infamously forgot its name during a GOP primary debate that year). If Perry thought we didn’t need the Department of Energy four years ago, why do we need it now? The only thing that’s changed is the party in control of the federal government—and the person who’ll be heading up the agency.

Do Conservatives Have Principles?

On a host of issues, from health care to free trade, we’re about to find out whether conservatives really mean what they say. In Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan and other top Republicans made clear last week that repealing Obamacare will be one of their top priorities. They haven’t yet said what will replace it, and there’s ample reason to believe that “repeal and replace” will end up being largely cosmetic, with major features of Obamacare staying in place.

That’s because many Republicans never really opposed major features of the health care law to begin with. Obamacare didn’t just destroy the private health insurance market by turning it into a massive income redistribution scheme, it also made hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars available to states that expanded Medicaid. To date, 32 states and Washington DC have expanded the joint state-federal health-care program for the poor. That includes Indiana, which adopted its Medicaid expansion under Gov. Mike Pence. At the time, Pence sold his “alternative” Medicaid expansion as a “market-driven” reform, even though it had nothing to do with market forces and wound up being worse than a straightforward expansion.

Does anyone seriously think Vice President Pence will support an Obamacare repeal that guts his Medicaid expansion in Indiana and pulls millions of federal tax dollars (or debt) out of state coffers nationwide, kicking millions of Americans out of those state Medicaid programs? What about Obamacare’s supposed prohibition on discrimination against applicants with preexisting conditions? Trump himself has said he’s willing to keep it. As Cato’s Michael Cannon has explained in some detail, the pre-existing conditions provisions are the centerpiece of the law.

“They are the reason the individual-mandate exists. It is those provisions, more than the mandate, that are driving premiums higher,” writes Cannon. “It is those provisions, and not the mandate, that are destabilizing health-insurance markets, reducing choice, and causing insurers to flee.”

In the coming weeks and months, Americans might be surprised to find out how little of Obamacare is actually repealed in congressional Republicans’ forthcoming “repeal.”

The Eerie Silence About Trump’s Protectionism

We might also be surprised at how little resistance conservatives offer to Trump’s trade protectionism. Last week, the president-elect again threatened a car company, saying Toyota would face a “border tax” if it builds a new plant in Mexico.



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http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/09/trumps-presidency-already-making-republicans-love-big-government/

[corbe]

From the Article:

Our massive federal government is an instrument of progressivism, pure and simple. Conservatives under Trump might be losing their skepticism of it out of a desire to harness the powers of the administrative state. But like Sauron’s One Ring, it serves only one master.

[montanajoe]

Wonder how long its going to take for the GOP to listen to Trump and his advisors and figure out he is the liberal many of us have been saying he is all along..

 

[corbe]

Wonder how long its going to take for the GOP to listen to Trump and his advisors and figure out he is the liberal many of us have been saying he is all along..

 

                                   This will happen first


   

[Frank Cannon]

I can't find any articles by John Daniel Davidson on Bush expanding big Govt'. Could be because he was still in middle school.

[Hondo69]

For the next 10 days I'll still be on my honeymoon in Mexico where the drinks are flowing and the sea breeze is making the umbrella in my drink wobble.  Makes me wobble too - everything is rosy.  Can't I just have 10 more days with my toes in the sand before you start posting reality articles? 

I know the honeymoon in my mind will end soon but until then this wristband of an election still gets me free drinks at the bar.